…policymakers viewed Rouhani’s election as a vindication of the 2009 protests on the Iranian street. The uprising was brutally repressed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp after Western powers turned a blind eye to the regime’s domestic violence and intimidation.

Not only was the rhetoric inconsistent with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s repressive stances on free speech, academic freedom, minority rights, religious pluralism, gender equality, and democratic activities but Rouhani’s follow-through on promised reforms proved elusive. Though it may not matter to Western officials, the failure to enact reforms greatly impacted Iranian citizens who came to rue their initial support for the apparent moderate.

Dr. Sheehan is the Director of the graduate programs in Negotiations & Conflict Management and Global Affairs & Human Security in the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

The briefing, held in the U.S. House of Representatives Rayburn Office Building, came just one week after a terrorist attack on Iranian dissidents killed 24 individuals and wounded dozens more. The briefing featured assessments of U.S. Iran policy in the the context of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran and bipartisan condemnations of recent violence directed at the Iranian opposition detained in Iraq. The missile attack received widespread coverage in U.S. media including articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, The Associated Press, and FOXnews.com.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) issued a strong statement describing the attack as an “outrage” which “represents a betrayal of the civilians the United States committed to protect.”

“The world’s shift to a pro-engagement policy with Tehran facilitated the decision to crack down on those individuals promoting freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, and a non-nuclear Iran.

The attack is just the most recent example of the Iranian regime’s continued state sponsorship of terrorism, in spite of the nuclear agreement.

As the United Nations General Assembly gets underway, Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs, weighs in at Al Jazeera on the human rights situation in Iran and the unique opportunity before world leaders.

Excerpts:

“The Iranian regime continues to execute its citizens at a higher rate than any U.N. member state. In fact the regime boasts the highest rate of executions per capita in the world, surpassing even China. More than two thousand have been executed on President Hassan Rouhani’s watch in just two years, more than in any similar period in the past twenty-five years.

Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution makes the case that regime change in Teheran is the “best nonproliferation policy.” But regime change from within may also be the best strategy to uphold human rights.

U.S. President Barack Obama makes a mistake by treating Tehran as a fixture of the Middle East landscape but other U.S. officials need not make the same mistake. International law does not simply guarantee sovereignty. It upholds human rights. States are instruments of and by the people, not the other way around.”

Dr. Sheehan is the Director of the graduate programs in Negotiations & Conflict Management and Global Affairs & Human Security in the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs, participated in a live online press briefing sponsored by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities (OIAC) on September 22. The briefing, broadcast from Paris, featured a roundtable discussion on Iran policy, human rights, and President Hassan Rouhani’s tenure in advance of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York.

Dr. Sheehan was joined at the briefing by several distinguished panelists, including:

Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs, and Dr. Raymond Tanter, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and former National Security Council Staff in the Reagan-Bush administration, take to the pages of Foreign Policy to issue a call for bipartisanship in the context of congressional oversight of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran.

Foreign Policy was founded in 1970 by prominent Harvard University professor of political science, Samuel Huntington, to give a voice to alternative views about American foreign policy at the time of the Vietnam War.

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